linux behaving badly (was Re: ownership and permissions)
> On Sun, 23 Nov 1997, Frank Barknecht wrote:
>
> > David Stern hat gesagt: // David Stern wrote:
> >
> > > Speaking of su, I have a root window (rxvt -e su --) in a user X-window
> > > session, and I seem to not be able to run X apps from the root window
> > > due to the DISPLAY env variable, but it is identical to user's (0:0),
> > > and running xhost complains about an invalid magic cookie, unable to
> > > open display. What do I need to do to get X apps to run from a root
> > > window in a user's X-window session?
> >
> > DON'T USE "xhost +"!
>
> With the above warning about xhost, (that is, not using 'xhost +' but
> rather 'xhost +localhost' (I have been told it's better to use xauth, but
> don't understand that). In any case, the reason you're getting errors
> when you try xhost is that xhost is an X command, and if root can't run X
> clients, it can't run xhost. So, the solution is either to run
> 'xhost +localhost' from an xterm as your regular user, or to (as root) do:
> cp ~username/.Xauthority ~root
> (where username is the username of your regular user)
I was trying out xhost ( +localhost), ssh, .. when something bad happened. I noticed my cpu load meter was high, but I didn't notice any renegade apps at first using top or ps -aux, then I noticed that I couldn't login as root (because it would hang at the login), and then I noticed that when I ran startx, my cpu load increased sequentially higher each time by about .25 . After my load was over 2.1 (I know..), I tried to do a three finger salute because I couldn't kill any processes without root access and I couldn't fire up ppp to ask for help, but even the three finger salute did nothing. <doh!>
A couple things which may either have contributed/caused, or be indicative of what went wrong are that I'd installed ssh and changed my .steprc to run "rxvt -e ssh -l root localhost". Also, the first line of top and the three zombies:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
11:16pm up 7:08h, 4 users, load average: 2.44, 2.24, 1.68
50 processes: 45 sleeping, 2 running, 3 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 7.2% user, 4.7% system, 0.0% nice, 88.2% idle
Mem: 63232K av, 53456K used, 9776K free, 23552K shrd, 8292K buff
Swap: 32092K av, 0K used, 32092K free 27992K cached
USER PID %CPU %MEM NI VSZ RSS SHRD TT STAT TIME COMMAND
root 15931 5.9 11.3 0 13196 7192 1556 ? R 0:11 X :0 -auth /home/user/ .Xauthority
[..]
root 15291 0.0 0.0 0 0 0 0 ? Z 0:00 request-route <zombie>
root 15292 0.0 0.0 0 0 0 0 ? Z 0:00 request-route <zombie>
root 15861 0.0 0.0 0 0 0 0 ? Z 0:01 wish4.2 <zombie>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oddly, even with a cpu load over 2.2, there was NO noticeable degredation of performance when executing netscape or other gui X-apps. The only things I could not do was login as root, or perform a three finger salute. I have a P133, kernel 2.0.30 (recent debian 1.31 cd install), 64MB ECC ram, uw-scsi..
Before my world turned upside down, I was able to successfully run X apps from rxvts and xterms using xhost, ssh, and was looking into xauth and .Xauthority. I may have ran something like "xauth" in an rxvt, which seems innocuous, but I'm not sure now. What was the danger alluded to in the warning above: "DON'T..", and what is the likely cause of this bad behavior?
David Stern
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